“No one likes a mad woman,” Taylor Swift famously declares on a haunting track from her 2020 album, Folklore.
Yet, it’s clear Taylor Swift adores a mad woman. Her extensive song catalog is rich with fierce portrayals of female figures often rejected and even condemned by societal norms for simply being too expressive. Think of the defiant witches in “I Did Something Bad,” the ‘insane’ ex-girlfriend comically depicted in her “Blank Space” music video, or the title character of “Mad Woman,” who challenges her critics with the unforgettable line, “Every time you call me crazy, I get more crazy — what about that?”
Given this pattern, it felt inevitable that Swift would eventually tackle one of literature’s most iconic symbols of female despair: Ophelia, the heart-wrenching figure from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whose descent into madness culminates in a tragic drowning.
Swift delivers on this promise with “The Fate of Ophelia,” the lead track and first single from her highly anticipated 12th original album, The Life of a Showgirl. She has fully embraced the theme: the song’s story revolves around Shakespeare’s ill-fated Danish princess, the music video opens with Swift reimagined as a model in a Pre-Raphaelite-style Ophelia portrait (a clear nod to John Everett Millais’s iconic 1852 painting), and the album cover itself is a contemporary homage to Millais’s vision, showcasing a bejeweled Swift submerged in bath water, yet staring directly at the audience, vibrantly and defiantly alive.
Swift is certainly not the first artist to find inspiration in Hamlet’s tragic love interest. Ophelia has captivated culture for centuries, emerging as Shakespeare’s most frequently painted heroine. Despite appearing in only five of the play’s twenty scenes—making her a minor character by script standards—her mystique is immense. This is partly due to the uncertain nature of her death (did she accidentally fall, or did she willingly enter the brook?) and the potent, often sexualized imagery Shakespeare uses to describe her madness.
Numerous musicians have also found her to be a compelling muse, perhaps because her name’s abundant vowels and lyrical flow seem inherently musical. Robbie Robertson sought her in a lively 1975 single by The Band, much like The Lumineers more recently did in a 2016 folk anthem. Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist, famously incorporated the phrase “the fate of Ophelia” into the band’s 1980 song “Althea”—a detail that makes one briefly ponder if Taylor Swift harbors a hidden love for the Grateful Dead. Even in Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” Ophelia faces a grim 22nd birthday: “Ophelia, she’s ’neath the window / For her I feel so afraid / On her twenty-second birthday / She already is an old maid.”
While some see Ophelia as a mere submissive victim, others—particularly certain feminist scholars—have worked to reinterpret her as a subtly rebellious figure, viewing her madness as a defiance of patriarchal norms. Natalie Merchant explored this perspective on her 1998 album, also titled Ophelia. Its title track re-envisions Ophelia as a timeless Everywoman, navigating various forms of female oppression across centuries. Merchant sings, “Ophelia was the rebel girl, a bluestocking suffragette,” who “remedied society between her cigarettes.”
However, in Swift’s sleek, upbeat, and incredibly catchy new single, Ophelia is presented less as a figure of subversive power and more as a cautionary tale. “You saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia,” Swift sings in the chorus. She even mentioned in an interview for “The Official Release Party of a Showgirl”—an album companion event shown in AMC theaters—that this marks her second time transforming a Shakespearean tragedy into a happily-ever-after story, following her reimagining of Romeo and Juliet’s destiny in “Love Story.”
“If you’d never come for me,” the new track continues, “I might have drowned in the melancholy / I swore my loyalty to me, myself and I / Right before you lit my sky up.”
While the song is a joyful ode to a powerful love—a more steadfast devotion than the inconsistent Hamlet ever offered Ophelia—it’s also somewhat disheartening. Swift seemingly reduces one of literature’s most compelling and ambiguous heroines into merely another princess awaiting her Prince Charming, and simplifies her complex madness into an affliction easily remedied by the right partner.
Certainly, there are constraints to storytelling within a three-and-a-half-minute pop song, and Swift has openly stated her goal for more concise lyrics on this album. However, by transforming Ophelia into solely a cautionary figure, Swift arguably diminishes her potent mystique—that captivating ambiguity that has inspired countless artists, debates, and songs for centuries.